The Paper Warrior: Education, Independence, and Bernal Diaz's War to Stop Time

Anger, be now your song . . .

—Iliad, Bk. I

Written in the 1570’s but not published until 1632, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera struggles for autonomy from the authorities, both textual and legal. ¹ First and foremost, Bernal wrestles with the issue of his authorial independence from the official biographer of Cortés, Francisco López de Gómara. The Historia verdadera also relates the historical struggles in which the old conquistadores fought to retain their hard-won spoils from their own governing institutions in the years after the Conquest. Finally, given the place of the Historia Verdadera as the foundational epic of Mexico, it is important to see how its multilayered struggle for autonomy has inscribed itself within Mexican national identity.

The Historia Verdadera dramatizes Bernal’s convoluted, Oedipal relationship to Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de México (1552). A noncomissioned soldier in Hernán Cortés’s army, Bernal participated in the wars of Conquest from 1519 to 1521. Official histories of this era scandalized Bernal because, in his opinion, they focussed too exclusively on Cortés. With little formal schooling, the sixty-year-old soldier began to write his own first-hand account of the Conquest. He describes the war from the point of view of the common soldier who—with fear in his throat as he faces mutiny, hunger, and slow death—nonetheless prevails against a formidable enemy. Bernal’s greatest wrath, far greater than his scorn for the enemy, is the epic anger he reserves for Gómara’s “history.” Gómara’s book is in fact primarily a glowing biography of Hernán Cortés. In Spain, Gómara was Cortés’s private chaplain, a trained man of letters familiar with Erasmian humanism. He was therefore the logical choice to write the res gestae of Cortés. Bernal is annoyed that Gómara, who had never set foot in the Indies, nevertheless undertakes to describe events there. But he is positively outraged that Gómara refuses to widen his tight focus on Cortés. Bernal holds no grudge against Cortés personally. But Gómara’s characterization of Cortés as the single-handed victor appalls Bernal, who comments, “Cortés ninguna cosa decía ni hacía sin primero tomar sobre ello muy maduro consejo y acuerdo con nosotros” (127; ch. 66). ² Bernal constantly reacts to what he sees as the injustices of Gómara’s version of events: “Y todo lo que dize Gómara sobre esto es burla,” becomes an almost tiresome refrain in Bernal’s text.

Writers like Solís in the eighteenth century, Prescott in the nineteenth, and many others today characterize Bernal and Gómara as diametric opposites. ³ Bernal himself pushes the idea that Gómara is literary whereas he himself is clumsy and crude. But this proclamation cannot escape the context of Bernal’s complicated relationship with Gómara, a relationship which is itself emblematic of larger struggles. In fact, Gómara’s text is highly literary and contrasts markedly with the apparent simplicity of Bernal’s account. For instance, at the beginning of his book, Gómara makes ironic use of the Homeric catalogue. He reduces the efforts of one of Cortés’s competitors to their paltry yield:

(Grijalba) Hubo, en fin, lo siguiente: Un idolico de oro, hueco. Otro idolejo de lo mismo, con cuernos y cabellera, que tenía un sartal al    cuello, un moscador en la mano, y una piedrecica en el ombligo. Una como patena de oro delgada, y con algunas piedras engastadas. Un casquete de oro, con cuernos y cabellera negra. Veintidós arracadas de oro, más chicas.

(1:51–52; ch. 6) ⁴

Gómara offers an erudite formal pun, an accounting instead of an account. Bernal is highly suspicious of such literary irony, which he seems not to understand, and instead chides Gómara for inaccuracy.

Bernal’s text itself has a humble narrative voice and the breathless tone of a...